Oh Canon 5D Mk II, how doest I love thee, let me count the ways. That could pretty much sum up my impressions of the newest camera from the folks at Canon but it probably doesn’t tell you what you really need to know. I certainly don’t have the testing lab that DPReview or Popular Photography has to tell you all the little specs and test results, but as someone who is shooting all the time, I figured I would get my hands on one and see if it really is all that it is hyped up to be.

2008 was certainly a banner year for photography enthusiasts when it comes to the number and quality of websites that you have to choose from. We certainly appreciate all the visitors here at cameradojo.com and hope we are doing a good job at bringing you good information and we are always thrilled to see our name on lists like this. Now it’s our turn to pay tribute to some of the best sites out there that we read on a regular basis.

Focal Point is OneOne Software’s newest Photoshop plug-in that allows you to create images with selective focus and edge vignette effects. Using these techniques you can guide the viewer’s eye to the spot in the image that you want them to look at. Using an easy to use “focus bug” you can control the sweet spot, the amount and kind of blur. These types of effects have only been possible with expensive specialty lenses before. Does Focal Point deliver on the goods? We decided to try it out for ourselves and see what we thought about it.

Time to change out the poll and review the results of the last one. Our last poll was about how many photos do you take per week and the numbers were actually very interesting.

* 23% shoot 101 – 250 images per week
That is a lot of people shooting a lot of images, good for you! Keep it up and post some in the forums

HDR Photography is a method of combining multiple exposures into a single image in order to achieve a greater dynamic range in an image. If that sounded a bit complex, let’s break that down a bit more. If I take a photo, the sensor only can capture a given range from light to dark, in a normally exposed image, you may lose some detail in the darkest areas and you may lose some detail in the brightest areas. But if we can take an normal exposure, an underexposed image (to get the detail in the highlights) and an overexposed image (to get the details in the shadows) and combine them into a single image, then we can get a new image that can be the best of all three.

David Hobby (http://strobist.com) has posted a thought provoking article today about whether or not you should consider doing work for free. This isn’t to say you should go on Craigslist and post that you will perform wedding photography worth thousands of dollars to everyone that emails you.

As part of our Photography Basics series we talked about Exposure already and this time we are going to cover the mystery of aperture. Aperture is probably the least understood setting of everything on your camera. While shutter settings are very easy to understand, to long of a shutter speed and you will get blurring, pretty simple stuff. Same with ISO, too high of ISO and you introduce digital noise. But learning how to use aperture properly can kill brain cells faster than a frat house kegger party.

Canon has posted updates to Digital Photo Professional, EOS Utility, WFT Utility and Picture Style Editor for Mac and Windows, bringing new features as well as support for digital SLRs up to and including the EOS 5D Mark II. They’ve also released a new version of Canon RAW Codec for Windows, which also adds support for the EOS 5D Mark II.

Now you can put a Camera Dojo widget on your own website! We know have a new widget that you can put on virtually any website and help other people know all about Camera Dojo. Every time we post a new article, your Camera Dojo widget will be automatically updated.

The 5th major iteration of the Camera Raw plug-in is now shipping as part of Photoshop CS4. Camera Raw 5 has a number of new features:

* Local adjustment brush
* Graduated Filter
* “Post Crop” Vignetting
* Opacity for the cloning/healing tool
* Improved Auto Adjustment
* Support for the new Camera Profiles that are still in beta form

On September 23, 2008, Lensbaby, LLC (formerly known as Lensbabies, LLC) is launching an entire new system of selective focus lenses at the Photokina tradeshow in Cologne, Germany (Hall 5.2 C021).

Move over Nikon with your piddly 780p D-Movie, Canon attacks back with a consumer grade camera that can do 1080p! The new SX10 IS features a 10 megapixel CMOS sensor, face detection, motion detection, and a plethora of outstanding features.